Yep. I hate to break out the bad news but this is true. I am running OSX Snow Leopard and Kies is a damn hog. I kept wondering why the processor speed was going at full blast, making the fan on my MacBook spin non-stop. Turns out that Kies was doing something in the background and looping too. I have heard that Kies does similar stunts on Lion so please mindful of what you run it on.

On the iMac, Kies OSX can be a resource hog as often as it wants as the larger systems have the capacity to cool the processor down but on the Macbooks, you could well burn out the logic board.

One reason why it goes loopy is due to the OTA sync. The moment your phone connects to a WiFi network that your computer is on, it initiates the desktop program to run in the background. So Kies OSX will keep running at full speed at a alarming 107 percent…swallowing up all of the processor resources.

This is bad. And my advice to you is to watch this carefully should you ever install it on your Macbooks.

If you are experiencing OTA problems with the ICS update, I suggest you try doing it with a computer. You first need Samsung’s desktop companion, Kies, which you can download here for your Mac or Windows desktop computer.

I was really quite frustrated when Samsung pushed the OTA update as the server connection was not consistent. Trusted that millions of others were doing the same update, there was no way to bypass the server but I did find the desktop update much easier to deal with.

But a word of warning. Kies for Windows is very buggy. My brother tried to update it via his Samsung Netbook and it failed to do so, citing some Windows errors that was incomprehensible at best. Kies for OSX Snow Leopard is much better but is really slow, probably due to the overloaded servers. The 300MB+ file took under 3 hours to update to the phone.

Upon first reboot, your apps will run slow. This is for the system to optimize and I suggest you do a second reboot for it to run smoother.

And yes, there are still some old apps which are incompatible to ICS. You have to weed them out as you go along. I found GetGlue to be one of those.

Though it runs far smoother and has nicer transitions, ICS has not saved me on battery life. It still runs the same as Gingerbread. Most of the bugs in Gingerbread has not turned up. One annoying one is upon reboot, where a ring tune gets played over and over. The only way to shut it is to turn on and off the notifications.

The Galaxy Note should be getting an ICS update anytime now however if you are experiencing any update problems, the Samsung servers are probably over whelmed. I have had two separate failures to date with WiFi updates and part of the problem is certainly the servers.

The ICS update is significant for the GN as there are several premium apps included for use with the S Pen. I figured that the 326MB update would just be for ICS but it turns out the whole suite of apps are included as well. This could explain why the Samsung update is not rolling out as smoothly.

It takes me under 30 mins to update the GN but each time, after about 10 mins, the server starts to drop the connection and I have to restart the update all over again. The GN update I am receiving is for the Internationally released model and not ones sent out to residents in Europe or America.

What Samsung could have done is to push the premium apps for the GN directly to their Samsung Appstore instead of packaging everything together. This way, you can get people to log into the store and download these apps separately at their convenience.

As I understand it, Samsung wants to include the S Pen suite with the ICS update to act as a one stop download for all phones but in order to do that, your servers should be up to mark on this. Right now, the updates are not rolling out in time for everyone because Samsung just isn’t into the Cloud computing space and will require time to get their act together. The investment called for is significant but as a products driven company, it still has some way to go to reach the level that Microsoft or Apple are at right now with servers and cloud storage.

This weakness should be addressed before Samsung gets even more ambitious.